Why Its So Damn Hard to Say — “I Don’t Know”
“People should wake up in the morning and start the day by practicing — I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” ~Howard Marks.
We are way more certain of our opinions than we should be.
If people are asked to give an estimate of a particular fact, such as unemployment rate or city population, and then shown someone else’s estimate and asked if they’d like to revise their own, they consistently give greater weight to their own view than others’, even when they’re not remotely knowledgeable in these areas.
This overconfidence extends to every single part of our lives.
Overconfidence sank the Titanic, it caused the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the loss of Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia, the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and the great recession that followed it.
As Peter Bevelin writes in Seeking Wisdom:
Most of us believe we are better performers, more honest and intelligent, have a better future, have a happier marriage, are less vulnerable than the average person, etc. But we can’t all be better than average.
Overconfidence is the mother of all psychological biases. It is one of the largest and most ubiquitous of the many biases to which human judgment is vulnerable.
In his 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman called overconfidence “the most significant of the cognitive biases.”
The prevalence of overconfidence can be traced back to our evolutionary history.
The brain is a prediction engine. And once it makes a prediction, it needs to believe it with every fiber of its being.
Uncertainty is painful, and in the case of our ancestors — deadly.
Uncertainty is the problem that our brains evolved to solve.
Resolving uncertainty is a unifying principle across biology, and thus is the inherent task of evolution, development, and learning.
This is why our brain evolved to take what is inherently uncertain and make it certain… every second of every day. The biological motivation of many of our social and cultural habits and reflexes, including religion and politics, and even hate and racism, is to diminish uncertainty through imposed rules and rigid environments.
Certainty meant life. Uncertainty meant death. To not “know” was to die.
The brain is comfortable when it is certain, regardless of the validity of the knowledge. But this is a dangerous place to be. It is way better to be uncertain, than be confident about the wrong things.
There is always a gap between what you believe to be true and what is actually true. To close that gap we need to approach each situation with an open mind.
We can all learn from scientists. Everything they say comes with an asterisk. They mention all the caveats and the drawbacks of their conclusions. Reading a published paper almost feels like reading a apology by the authors for not being able to be accurate.
They know they are intelligent, but they also know their limits.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once described how you can spot a real expert versus a phony. “Look for three little words, ‘I don’t know.’ The phony will have all the answers, while the expert will be willing to admit what they don’t know.”
“I don’t know” is powerful. It can save us from ourselves, from our worst mistakes.
But “I don’t know” runs counter to everything we see in society, everything we are told to do. It runs counter to millions of years of evolution.
When it comes to dealing with uncertainty, it is difficult of find someone more knowledgeable than Ray Dalio. He started his hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, out of a two-bedroom apartment and it now manages $160 billion in assets and is the largest hedge fund in the world.
He attributes his success to “Radical-Openmindness” — his strategy to overcome overconfidence.
According to him,“The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.”
a. Understand your ego barrier.
When I refer to your “ego barrier,” I’m referring to your subliminal defense mechanisms that make it hard for you to accept your mistakes and weaknesses.
Your deepest-seated needs and fears — such as the need to be loved and the fear of losing love, the need to survive and the fear of not surviving, the need to be important and the fear of not mattering — reside in primitive parts of your brain such as the amygdala, which are structures in your temporal lobe that process emotions.
Because these areas of your brain are not accessible to your conscious awareness, it is virtually impossible for you to understand what they want and how they control you. They oversimplify things and react instinctively. They crave praise and respond to criticism as an attack, even when the higher-level parts of the brain understand that constructive criticism is good for you. They make you defensive, especially when it comes to the subject of how good you are.
At the same time, higher-level consciousness resides in your neocortex, more specifically in the part called the prefrontal cortex…This is where you experience the conscious awareness of decision making, as well as the application of logic and reasoning.
b. Your two “yous” fight to control you.
It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though your higher-level you is not aware of your lower-level you. This conflict is universal; if you pay close enough attention, you can actually see when the different parts of a person’s brain are arguing with one another.
Once you understand how your a) logical/conscious you and b) emotional/subconscious you fight with each other, you can imagine what it’s like when your two “yous” deal with other people and their own two “thems.” It’s a mess.
Those lower-level selves are like attack dogs — they want to fight even when their higher-level selves want to figure things out.
This is very confusing because you and the people you are dealing with typically don’t even know that these lower-level beasts exist, never mind that they are trying to hijack everyone’s behavior.
c. Understand your blind spot barrier.
In addition to your ego barrier, you (and everyone else) also have blind spots — areas where your way of thinking prevents you from seeing things accurately. Just as we all have different ranges for hearing pitch and seeing colors, we have different ranges for seeing and understanding things. We each see things in our own way.
These differences in how our brains work are much less apparent than the differences in how our bodies work. Color-blind people eventually find out that they are color-blind, whereas most people never see or understand the ways in which their ways of thinking make them blind.
To make it even harder, we don’t like to see ourselves or others as having blind spots, even though we all have them. When you point out someone’s psychological weakness, it’s generally about as well received as if you pointed out a physical weakness.
These two barriers — ego and blind spots — are the fatal flaws that keep us from reaching our potential.
If we let these barriers dominate our decision-making we are doomed to live a life that pushes us away from the best version of ourselves.
Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.
The first step to overcome these barriers, is to know that you are blind.
Learning about your blind spots and open-mindedly considering the possibility that others might see something better than you is an invaluable skill.
But for most of us, this does not come naturally. We form opinions and close our mind to any other perspectives.
Close-mindedness and overconfidence is worse than ignorance. If we know that we don’t know the answer we will be more open to hearing from others with real expertise. If we think that we know enough, we’ll just cobble together what seems to us to be the best response possible.
Open-mindedness, on the other hand, is motivated by the genuine worry that you might not be seeing your choices optimally. It is the ability to effectively explore different points of view without letting your ego or your blind spots get in your way.
Second step is to identify areas of close-mindedness and address them. No one is close-minded in every situation. All of us have areas where we have the necessary expertise to be confident. Then we have areas where we have no reason to be confident, but we irrationally believe that we know the answer.
Understanding where you are open-minded and where you are close-minded opens a whole world of opportunities.
Ray Dalio shares a 7 point list to identify traits of close-mindedness:
1. Closed-minded people don’t want their ideas challenged
They are typically frustrated that they can’t get the other person to agree with them instead of curious as to why the other person disagrees. They feel bad about getting something wrong and are more interested in being proven right than in asking questions and learning others’ perspectives.
Open-minded people are more curious about why there is disagreement. They are not angry when someone disagrees. They understand that there is always the possibility that they might be wrong and that it’s worth the little bit of time it takes to consider the other person’s views in order to be sure they aren’t missing something or making a mistake.
2. Closed-minded people are more likely to make statements than ask questions
Open-minded people genuinely believe they could be wrong; the questions that they ask are genuine. They also assess their relative believability to determine whether their primary role should be as a student, a teacher, or a peer.
3. Closed-minded people focus much more on being understood than on understanding others
When people disagree, they tend to be quicker to assume that they aren’t being understood than to consider whether they’re the ones who are not understanding the other person’s perspective.
Open-minded people always feel compelled to see things through others’ eyes.
4. Closed-minded people say things like “I could be wrong . . . but here’s my opinion.”
This is a classic cue I hear all the time. It’s often a perfunctory gesture that allows people to hold their own opinion while convincing themselves that they are being open-minded. If your statement starts with “I could be wrong” or “I’m not believable,” you should probably follow it with a question and not an assertion.
Open-minded people know when to make statements and when to ask questions.
5. Closed-minded people block others from speaking.
If it seems like someone isn’t leaving space for the other person in a conversation, it’s possible they are blocking.
Open-minded people are always more interested in listening than in speaking; they encourage others to voice their views.
6. Closed-minded people have trouble holding two thoughts simultaneously in their minds.
They allow their own view to crowd out those of others.
Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well — they can hold two or more conflicting concepts in their mind and go back and forth between them to assess their relative merits.
7. Closed-minded people lack a deep sense of humility.
Humility typically comes from an experience of crashing, which leads to an enlightened focus on knowing what one doesn’t know.
Open-minded people approach everything with a deep-seated fear that they may be wrong.
Someone once said, “The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.”
There is nothing more dangerous in life than being sure of something you don’t know.
Learning to acknowledge your weakness will set you apart in a world where people are constantly trying to find reasons why they are right.
At the end of the day, it does not matter if you are right or wrong.
When our desire to find the truth overcomes our desire to be right, we open ourselves to become the best version of ourselves.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”~Richard P. Feynman
